How Mother Nature Dealt with Earth's Creatures

These stories for fourth to sixth graders have an environmental theme: maintaining a balance among the creatures of the earth. There is also an anthropological theme: the personification of various species makes history and development of the inhabitants of the earth available to children in such a way that they will be entertained but will also learn details they might not encounter otherwise for many years to come in their classes in social studies. Mother Nature is the protagonist in all the stories. She appears intermittently through the ages, always with the purpose of assisting the creatures and protecting those who might be forced into extinction, except for the dinosaurs, of course, whose extinction she engineers.